


Forward

by countessofbiscuit



Series: Billet Deux [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Background Rexsoka, Chance Meetings, Dialogue, Episode: s07e9 Old Friends Not Forgotten, F/M, Flirting, Leans Heavily into Legends, Making Out, Mandalorian Fetts, Mandalorian Politics, Missing Scene, Siege of Mandalore, Star Wars: Son of Dathomir, The History We Share, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:01:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24880495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/countessofbiscuit/pseuds/countessofbiscuit
Summary: “Lieutenant, that Mando fighter,” Cody barks, nearly spilling his caf as he turns from the viewport. “Who cleared it?”“General Kenobi, sir. Comm—I mean, Ahsoka Tano is on board.”“... just Tano?”“No, sir, she’s accompanied by a Lady Bo-Katan of Mandalore.”
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody/Bo-Katan Kryze
Series: Billet Deux [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1866766
Comments: 3
Kudos: 40





	Forward

**Author's Note:**

> They were probably maybe canonically on the same destroyer. Of course they need to bump into each other.
> 
> (This fic was up for a couple days before I deleted it in a manic episode that saw a couple other works bite the dust, too. I'm republishing this one because some kind anon on tumblr said they wanted more BoCody, and to thank (?) myself for not deleting my entire archive ... which nearly happened.)

“This will be a waste of time,” she’d told Tano, as Melsha set the nav for the deep Core. Ursa had picked up comm chatter about Maul’s probable return to Sundari, and it’s a long way to any Third Army theatre on a Kom’rk hyperdrive.

Fives days and too much fuel later Bo-Katan is proven right, Manda rest her sister.

It’s humiliating, to come all this way just to breathe the same recycled air. To let them see her anxious despair in the flesh, and to still be told, _please hold._

And _he_ had seen her: Kenobi’s golden meat-droid, her unintended liaison of a marshal commander, whose intelligence minders had let her keep. Probably for a fucking laugh: he makes Spec Ops sound like its own clan of Keldabe-kissed vode.

He watched her stalk off her ship, ready to prostrate herself before the Republic. To beg face-to-face. The hangar throbbed with activity, a sea of white and gold and blue, and his face was everywhere. But she recognized _him_ —that scarred temple peering down from a platform, leg propped up on a rail, garter stripe over his right thigh, extremely at ease with himself.

She’s doubly mad when she exits the comms room, too angry to remember which turbolift bay to use.

The Commander is standing there, caf in hand, next to the security booth where they’d been required to hand in their grenades. He’s obviously lurking with intent, but she is less than flattered.

“Well, if it isn’t the Mandalorian Resistance,” he says, appraising her casually as she gets her shit back and asks the security clone for directions. The reply is so convoluted—and she’s so stupidly undone by the shock of being within three feet of this unmasked Fett—she has to click on her recorder.

“I’ll meet you at the ship,” she tells Gedyc and Melsha, waving them off. She surprises herself by wanting a word with this aggravatingly handsome and somewhat important man. Might as well learn how enormously she’s misjudged the impression she’d made on him, too, while she’s down for the count.

The Commander sips his caf. “I see you finally got through.”

“No thanks to you.”

“Hey, I put a good word in for you. More than one. I was getting quite a reputation.”

“As what, a fool?”

“Worse—a sympathizer. They’ve been calling me names. It’s been hell.” He turns to his comrade in the booth. “What is it they call me, Reno?”

The clone doesn’t even look up from his monitor, twisting a dial on his helmet like he’s comfortable processing two streams of audio and fuck knows how much visual data at once. “Cod’ika, sir. _Kote,_ if they’re being nice.”

“See?” the Commander smirks. He turns and indicates for her to follow. “But you found a better ambassador.”

“Yeah, so _much_ better,” she says to his broad back, studying the armor she rarely sees him in. “Kenobi had all the time in the galaxy for me in there.”

He leads the way down a corridor or three, and Bo-Katan mentally maps the return route with every turn. Command quarters, she thinks, to judge from the prevailing quiet and generous spacing of the doors. One slides open when he flashes his forearm at a panel, inviting her into a small, windowless office. There’s a comfy-looking chair and a simple desk with a built-in holoprojector. A room where two’s a crowd and three’s an unexpected grope.

She leans against the desk, placing her helmet down next to her, and looks around. Familiarity is rendered vivid. “So this is where you take my calls. Cozy.”

The Commander flicks on a task lamp and drops into his chair. “Until you finally stopped calling. Just when we were becoming friends.”

She’s not ready to match his flirtatious good mood. He must have just won a battle, all easy hubris in the flush of victory. It’s been a very long time since she’s known it herself.

“Waste of breath,” she sighs, recalling the frustration of finally being called back, only to be pressed by Kenobi to corroborate some nunabrained theory that Maul’s puppet regime was aligned with Dooku. She could not— _would_ not, so absurd was the idea, and she rued it still: she hadn’t given them the tidy answer they wanted, so they’d given Mandalore the square root of fuck all.

“And then I had Tano in my backwash,” she continues. “She’s nervy about you lot. Told me to stop trying until we had an offer the Council couldn’t refuse.”

“Where d'you find her?”

“Oba Diah.”

He makes a face. “Was she taking down a spice den? Or hitting one up?”

“She’d fallen in with some two-bit smugglers. It’s what all the cool coreworld dropouts do.”

“And you … recruited her _how?_ ”

“Flashed a holo of Maul. He’s my meal ticket to you people—or was. She needed a mission.” Bo-Katan still can't believe her good luck: how easily Tano had agreed to join this cause stitched up in a threadbare kama, itching for a fight. So quick to give over old but vital intelligence. Not that it had come to anything, except to satisfy a small part of Bo-Katan's conscience: she'd done a charitable act by taking in a stray, and Tano was set for years with some secondhand beskar.

“You should’ve told me when you had her,” he says. He drains his fragrant, weapons-grade caf and sets his cup next to her thigh. “General Skywalker was a wreck when she left. You might’ve had a battalion within a day.”

“I wanted to. She nearly popped the airlock when I said I had you on speed-dial. I think she was embarrassed.”

He nods, chewing his lip, like he’s adding a footnote to memory. “Her departure was … not good.”

“And then when it came out that she and that jaig-bird friend of yours were an item, I begged her to call him.”

“Ahh.” His dark brow creases with more age than he even he’s earned, front-line capable aged five. “She would never compromise him.”

“So I was told.” Bo-Katan looks down at the dregs in his cup. She wonders how much stomach the Commander has today for the bitter truths she likes to serve.

“She knows we can’t authorize anything,” he sighs, landing remarkably close to her thoughts.

“No one can, apparently. Except some mystics in their topside tower. How do you live with it?”

His broad, plated shoulders shrug. “Chafing against it won’t end this war sooner. This helps.” He reaches behind his chair for a bottle among datapads, and now she can make out the label of his favorite tipple: Savareen brandy. Pulling out the stopper, he holds out it for her.

“Why not, I’m at the Council’s mercy. _Again,_ ” she groans and accepts it with a full, choking swig. The liquor scalds. Manda, it’s been a while since she’s let herself get a little tight. Not since that blond head had rolled and the responsibility of resistance had fallen to her shoulders: a youngest sister, born with stiff knees that refused to bend. Except maybe when the campfire tihaar came out.

Bo-Katan is talking before she knows what she’s doing, emboldened by the drink long before it can excuse what she says. “I wanted the Seps to invade. Can you believe that? My own system. _Then_ the clans would sit up, I told myself, _then_ the Republic would listen. I almost lied when Kenobi commed. I almost said, _of course_ Maul and Dooku are aligned. You better send a battalion, a brigade if you can spare it.”

“Are the people still so resigned?”

“They don’t see _him!_ They see Almec and they don’t see battle droids or _clones_ —” she gestures sarcastically at him, stars knows she’d love to see a million of him on Mandalore—“so they are content. They can dust off babuir’s beskar and talk about visiting ba’vodu in Olankur after all these years, and the fact that a Sith and his criminal ilk are dug in like a galltick into their homeworld—not _mine,_ by the way—means nothing.”

“Should it? Do the shuttles not run on time?” The Commander spreads his arms expansively, offering her the empty everything of this truth.

“Nothing’s late if you’re spiced. Everything arrives precisely when it’s supposed to.” If she’d been outside, she might have spat, purging her disgust and the fatty tails of the brandy from her mouth. “Maul is _no_ Mando’ad.”

He snorts and reaches for the bottle. She stares at him as he drinks his long, practiced fill. It’s almost the same angle, looking down at him from the desk where she normally appears. Except now he’s close enough to touch, in all his colorful corporeality.

“What?” he says after a while, interrupting her study of his noble, sculpted brow.

“Sorry, it’s just …” She bends forward, elbows on knees, and peers at him. At this monumental face he’d inherited. This face that had permanently scarred her resolve never to look back. _“Fett.”_

He flinches from any touch she might try. “An accident with my jaig-bird friend tried to render it distinctive.”

“It worked.”

“What will you do now,” he asks abruptly, with the flattest affect, trying to squeeze out from under her scrutiny.

Bo-Katan huffs. “Pray there’s a quorum and that transceiver traffic is light. We can’t linger.”

“Tano may be persuasive than you think. I think you’ll get your battalion, after all.”

She swipes the bottle from where he’s balanced it on his thigh. “I need a brigade, _at least._ ”

“Sith are slippery. He’ll just cut through my men like butter, whatever the numbers. I saw him do it on the outpost. And he’ll do it again.”

It’s the work of a moment to decide to spill the whole of her strategy to him, to entomb her pitch and the Mandalorian fucking Resistance in this gloom. He’s never had any time for her cause, yet he’s often made time for her. She repays this candor. And if he’s been feeding up to Republic Intelligence and not just humoring her, at least something interesting might happen with the shit that comes down.

“I’ll be blunt with you. The Jedi are a front— _Tano_ is a front. Sure, I’d like one of them to slice the head off the snake, but I need forces to take on his fanatical army. To crush Almec and his corrupting influence. And to get Shysa and the other clans to fucking pay attention. I _need_ an invasion.”

The Commander nods distantly, like he’s being validated in some gut belief. “An army to bend over for you.”

“Just the once.”

“They always say that.” He claps his gloved hands in his lap, settling back in his chair like an elder keen to learn you some blood-bought philosophy. “Then they ask you to not to straighten up, lest you lift the boot.”

“Not me. I hate the smell of a standing army.”

“So you’d just march us somewhere else. Like Concordia. Or Zanbar. Or ... what’s that planet that stole your sister and killed your father?”—he exaggerates tip-of-tongue befuddlement—“Irmoo?”

Bo-Katan refuses to take the bait. She stabs her finger in the thin groove of his armored chest, where his karta should be. “Look me in the eye and tell me it’d be worse. You could make a difference. Answer to no one.”

“Just you.”

“I don’t _own_ you.”

He never likes it when she points that out; it’s evident in the way he crosses his arms and clenches his jaw, clearly forcing himself not to break eye contact. But Bo-Katan is most comfortable when others are not: when she’s unbalanced someone with a punch or a retort. Her sister’s answer to conflict had been to seek solutions to make it stop; Bo-Katan’s answer is to hit back _harder._ And she’ll keep bashing this truth over the Commander's stubborn skull until his spirit cracks. Or until he disappoints her by placidly accepting it.

“Funny thing about command,” he says, when the silence outgrows the room. “It’s not about who you answer to, but you who have to answer for. My duty to the Republic may be flimsy and manufactured and—”

“Not worth a mott’s shebs.”

“Yes, that, thank you—but my duty to my men is paramount. Baked in deep. Deeper than any of your complaints about indoctrination and too intense for any gene fuckery.”

He’s right, because he’s more mandokarla than he’ll _ever_ admit. Bo-Katan claws her temple and shakes her head. “Manda fucking wept. I don’t _want_ to welcome the Republic on Mandalore, but I’d sure as shab welcome you. And your men.”

“All however many million there are left?”

“We’ve got lots of wide open spaces.” That’d be one way to resolve the equatorial DMZ: plant an army of Kryze-friendly Fetts inside the probably-habitable zone and make Keldabe wet itself in a confusion of joy and terror—and inform that august, Republic-sponsored body of hot air known as The Commission for Ecological Restoration to get some thrust up their project or Kalevala would be next.

“What, twenty acres and a bantha?” he scoffs. “Actually, you should put that before the Senate. They’ll need to put us out to pasture somewhere.”

“Good luck getting the grass to seed. But you’d be wasted in wasteland.”

He cocks his head, mouth fighting the pull of a grin. This close, she can see the lines where previous smiles have lingered. “Where would you have me?” he asks. “Weeding the palace water garden?”

“Chief Protector.”

He snorts and snatches the bottle back. “Pretty sure that’s an entire subgenre of Mando porn.”

“It’s an actual title,” she snaps, a bit offended, foolishly, on the Protectors’ behalf. Those True-Mandos-by-any-other-name won’t lift a finger to help anyone who isn’t the Mand’alor. And they’ll willingly stagnate on Concord Dawn for another six centuries before they’ll help decide the question. “Fett came from a Protector line. You could carry on the family tradition.”

Bo-Katan leaves off the part about how warm and wet she’s getting at the thought.

A decade ago, she pleaded into those same dark eyes, begging to be hired—for what, she didn’t know, but she’d been young and desperate to prove her mettle. Now she’s the one recruiting from the army Fett had spawned. But still she feels powerless: like she's trying to buy in on a high-stakes game with flimsi.

The Commander uncrosses his arms and tucks them behind his head. “I’ve got a lot of brothers.”

“None of them are you.” The brandy speaks for her into the inviting space between his rich lips and his artificially stiff crotch. _Fecund as a tibanna clip_ —that's how he'd described himself; but her lust, hardwired and long-fermented, wants whatever he’s got to unload into her. Bo-Katan had been angry. The emotion had slipped sharply into desire, born on the same current of frustration.

“This is definitely the most elaborate means of propositioning me,” the Commander says.

“Okay, I’ll put it more crudely.” Throwing her legs up around his waist, Bo-Katan flops into his hard lap. And she kisses him, firmly.

He grunts in surprise. His hands seize her biceps, gripping hard. But he doesn’t push her off, and he doesn’t pull back.

She cradles his strong jaw and drinks in the smell of him: caf and ozone and stale sweat. He is all dirtside organic, up here in deep space. Like a mud-spitting fight, like a dug-in siege—nothing she needs right now, but everything her heart craves.

His hands hold fast; his lips yield. Bo-Katan presses the slim advantage and offers her tongue, which he accepts in wet agreement.

It’s stupid. Bo-Katan of Past and Future scowls in disgust at Bo-Katan of Present, trying to get off by grinding on the first Fett who’s listened to her. But why else has she survived, if not to find him again in the deepest dark? She is dha’cenaar and she has been patient.

She sucks on his tongue, teasing him with profane possibilities—teasing herself, too: Chief Protector Cody, thighs bared, the Mand’alor wrapping her lips around his cock as he stands rigid, upholding the dignity of his post at the right hand of the throne. 

“Come with me,” she moans into his open mouth. _Conquer your conquerors,_ she thinks, _and let’s put the fear of Fett into Sundari again._

“And what,” he huffs, biting her lower lip, “my lady will bare besh and wash her servant’s sins with the cream of her loins?”

Bo-Katan actually laughs, with a squirt into her flightsuit. He has all the delicacy of a goran left too long in their forge, and it’s her favorite thing about him. “Coreward holoporn sometimes gets it right.”

Her infatuation with Jango, a man she'd met but twice, had been girlish. She's in the fullest flush of mature desire over this man, this finest clone of his, this Cody, who somehow improves even on the original. She mouths him with greed. Measured kisses get lost to strong-jawed lust. She aches to press the hot give and take of his flesh into her memory for later—after he’s denied her again, and she’s left chasing this feeling of flame up her spine.

He matches her hunger and widens his seat, sinking into his back. It lifts his codplate to her crotch. Bo-Katan is close, _very_ close, to forgiving every fool’s hope that cost so much fuel to bring her here.

Defenses well and properly downed, he lets go of her arms. Big, balmy hands spread over the swell of her hips; his wrists bump against the butts of her Westars. She imagines tossing him one, his sharp brow sighting down the barrel to find Saxon’s pale temple and painting a bright bloodflower onto Sundari glass. A proper initiation: _welcome to the clan, Kote—now you’ve earned the name._

Bo-Katan’s head lolls back, giving him her neck. He gnaws and sucks the skin above her suit, stealing her breath at her throat. It's the most intimate anyone's been with her in months upon months. Birdbumbs bristle down her body, even to her curling toes. She threads her fingers into his close hair. His thumbs explore the creases that dip from her hips towards—

Klaxons wallop the room with ear-splitting fury.

 _“Shab,”_ they both choke out, in their truest moment of commonality yet. She wants to rib him about it, but his comm chirps to life.

_“SOS from Triple-Zero, sir. Grievous. Action quarters to be assumed. Admiral Yularen standing by to issue the jump on General Kenobi’s command.”_

“Copy that,” he says with the unhurried care of naval deadweight.

“Not while I’m here, he’s fucking not.” Bo-Katan scrambles from his lap and grabs her helmet. Her licked blood turns bilious again to remember that it will take seven standard days to limp back to Mandalore from here. She’ll be damned if she gives Maul any more of a head start. If Tano is necking her captain in a supply closet somewhere, she’ll have thirty seconds to show before she's left behind.

The shrill wail of alarm against plasteel is aggravating. She leaves the Commander before he's even risen from his chair, probably comfortable that he has thousands of hyper-capable subordinates to run the general alarm SOPs finer than strill down.

She’s turned down the last of four corridors before he finally catches up with her.

“A Mandalorian is always welcome in a warzone, you know,” he teases loudly.

Bo-Katan rolls her eyes, coming to a stumped halt before the turbolift bays. “So come visit mine, when you’ve sorted out yours.”

He summons the correct one for her. “With or without a venator?”

“Just the brigade,” she says, stepping into the proffered lift. He comes halfway inside himself to punch a series of buttons. Snatching a grope on his cod, her fingertips catching the warm lip of his plate behind his balls, Bo-Katan holds him stiffly before her. “If those bay doors close before I’m clear, I’m lighting that hangar up.”

He wrenches her wrist free with a backwards step and a backthrottle turn into seriousness. “Hot air won’t get you an army, but it might bring one down on you.”

"Who knows, I might enjoy that," she tries to sneer. But it just stings and wells up behind her eyes, as another door closes on her hope for Mandalore.

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously, Bo-K steps out of that lift to some good news. 
> 
> I respect the GAR's ability to mobilize rapidly, but damn, it would take _at least_ an hour or two to get a unit split (much less a fleet) and everyone squared away before jumping in opposite directions. I like to think Cody was charitable enough to comm her good luck in that time :p


End file.
